Through the championship of Michael Hofmann, the name of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth has become known in this country. Hofmann's translations of Radetzkymarsch (1932) and Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (1939), vivid and melancholy novels of the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire, have brought Roth out of the shadow of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann.

Yet, in his lifetime, Roth was known chiefly as a literary journalist, one of the very best in the German-speaking countries. His speciality was a now vanished newspaper form called the feuilleton, in which favoured writers would shine bright and intensely literary flashlights into corners of metropolitan existence. The last practitioners of this style expired about 15 years ago in the "Talk of the Town" section of that most European of publications, the New Yorker.

Roth's reports from Berlin in the 1920s, collected as a guide-book by Michael Bienert in 1996 as Joseph Roth in Berlin, have been translated by Hofmann. Sketches of no more than a few thousand words each, they are not a documentary account of the Weimar republic. Yet they leave a sharper and more lasting impression than, say, the Tagebücher (diaries) of Harry, Graf Kessler. Roth's Berlin is a city striving for a blind modernity amid shame and nostalgia. It is a city that, like the Kurfürstendamm itself, leads nowhere but itself, and the newspaper editions chase one another around a treadmill of print.

Roth was born into a Jewish family in 1894 in Galicia, on the eastern borders of the Habsburg empire (reproduced as the frontier garrison town in Radetzkymarsch). In the first world war Roth served on the eastern front in an obscure capacity in the Austro-Hungarian army. As he writes here in his report from the Reichstag, he lost the war like General Ludendorff, but unlike Ludendorff, "nobody gave me any medals or decorations" for it.

Roth wrote at first for leftwing newspapers in Vienna. In 1920, he moved to Berlin and found a job as a local reporter on the Berliner Boersen-Courier. In early 1923, he was appointed Feuilletonkorrespondent of what is still the leading bourgeois newspaper in Germany, the Frankfurter Zeitung (now the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). His articles appeared in Gothic type under the byline "rth". Roth wrote colour pieces, court reports and book, film and theatre reviews. His first novel, Das Spinnennetz ( The Spider's Web), appeared that year. Set in an extreme rightwing milieu, it was acted out in Hitler's Munich putsch later in the year.

In 1925, when General Hindenburg was appointed president of the republic - Hindenburg boasted he'd never read a book - Roth moved from Berlin, but returned to write feuilletons as late as 1930. He had lost by then most of his leftist illusions. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Roth left Germany and lived a precarious hotel existence in Paris, Amsterdam and Ostend before dying, in a sort of despair, in May 1939.

If Roth's novels have a fault, it is a flatness of character. Roth's men do not exist except as gorgeous uniforms. (The exception which proves the rule is the super-uniform, the Emperor Franz Joseph himself.) His women are fairly simple mechanisms for producing shame or sorrow. In Roth's journalism, this flatness, or what the Germans would call Einseitigkeit, is the virtue. Town characters are captured in a single glance: Jewish brokers in the Hirtenstrasse, the newspaper waiter at the Romanisches Café in the west end, a war cripple who finds a lady's lost nailfile and, suddenly, "starts filing his nails". Roth is fascinated by frantic movement - motor traffic, the view from the S-Bahn into houses, railway junctions, aviation, endurance cycle races. His futurism is lyrical rather than strictly mechanical. "See the Tin Lake," he writes at the new Luna Park. At the exhibition of entries for the competition to build a skyscraper at the Friedrichstrasse, Roth dreams of a bar in the clouds, where it rains champagne cocktails. (Mies van der Rohe's rejected entry, looking more like an immense iceberg riding up the River Spree, is one of many beautiful illustrations.)

Yet Roth can still look at the modern metropolis with the eye of a country dweller. At a bath house where commercial travellers spend the night, or the UFA cinema on the Kudamm, or the immense new Karstadt department store, or in the upside-down rooms of modern interior design, Roth writes as if Walter Benjamin had teamed up with Monsieur Hulot. He understands how perspective and value vanish in the modern city in the blare of advertising. He is fascinated (as Benjamin was) by doomed or Quixotic acts of mimicry, such as the Temple of Solomon devotedly built out of cardboard on a scale of 1:70, or a ruined waxworks.

At times, as with all such columnists, Roth uses a literary sledgehammer on a phenomenal nut. Yet each one of these pieces carries a hint of the menace in the air. A nationalist bore who interrupts the sunny torpor of a Sunday morning barber's shop collects in his person the miseries and irritations of a lifetime: "The man in the barber shop is the neat notebook of my schoolfriend; my school-master's class log; simultaneous equations; a book of logarithms. He is my headmaster's address at assembly; the kiss of my old-maid aunt; dinner with my guardian; an afternoon in an orphanage; a game of dominoes with my deaf grandfather." The translation, as you can see, is very good. There is one mistake ("jejeune"), a page missing and a lost footnote.

On May 10 1933, in the Opernplatz, the Nazis staged their bonfire of books, which would have included (if only for honour's sake) The Spider's Web. Roth's response from Paris was a majestic defence of the Jewish literary culture of Germany, and also of the metropolitan enterprise of which this book is a gleaming production: "The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city... They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis." This is the actual Germany, not the fake Nazi pageant of racial purity and pig-tails. "We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned in Germany!"

· James Buchan was a newspaper correspondent in Germany in the 1980s.

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